The six right wingers on the Supreme Court not only declared the end of affirmative action, which had tried to give qualified minorities access to higher education. They also snuffed out President Joe Biden’s attempt to provide relief for college grads who faced crushing debt when they got out of school.
When Biden in June 2022 announced his plan to cancel $10,000 worth of loans for people earning less than $125,000 a year, and another $10,000 for borrowers who had received Pell grants, which went to students who displayed “exceptional financial need,” it was estimated nearly 45% of borrowers, or 20 million people, would have their debt fully canceled.
For the remaining 55%, a new plan would offer more relaxed terms for loan repayment. “I just can’t underscore what a huge deal this is in millions of borrowers’ lives,” Kyra Taylor, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told ABC News in August 2022.
But many of those who paid off their loans couldn’t stand it.
“There are millions of Americans like me for whom debt forgiveness is an infuriating slap in the face after years of hard work and sacrifice,” Bethany Mandel wrote for Fox “News” June 15, 2022. “Those used to be qualities we encouraged as an American culture, and if Biden gets his way, we’ll be sending a very different message to the next generation.”
Forgiving those loans, we think, would send a message that we’re sorry we let the cost of college get so far out of control that students end up with demands to start payment on $100,000 or more on accumulated loans, in addition to their diplomas.
The disgruntled college grads who repaid their loans should demand Republicans join Democrats in passing a bill to include a $10,000 rebate for those who paid off their loans, in addition to cancellation for those who are still in debt. Then, we could restore affordable higher education opportunities, which fueled the greatest economic boom in history in the 1950s and ’60s.
As World War II was drawing to a close, President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22, 1944, signed the GI Bill of Rights into law. It provided tuition and living expenses, as well as unemployment and housing assistance for returning veterans. It paid for 2.2 million veterans to attend colleges and universities, and 5.6 million got training for good jobs after they got home. (Of course, a disproportionate share of the benefits went to White veterans.) Economists later found that GI Bill veterans ended up paying $7 in taxes for every dollar spent to educate them, and the newly middle-class vets built the consensus that children of working-class families should have access to higher education.
The National Defense Education Act was passed in 1958 and signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower to provide funding to colleges and universities and low-interest National Defense Student Loans to “promising, yet needy students” of mathematics, engineering and foreign languages, as well as those who desired to teach in elementary or secondary schools. The Act was amended in 1964 to provide loans to other students, and the Higher Education Act was passed in 1965 to provide more assistance to universities and financial assistance for students. University enrollment, which was only about a half million in 1940, grew to 7.6 million in 1970, helped by relatively low tuition at state universities.
Many states kept their university tuition low, at least for their residents. Texans used to be proud that university costs were low enough that the children of working-class parents could pursue a college education. In 1970, the state paid 85% of the cost of running the state’s universities, and tuition and fees for the regular workload of 15 hours was $104 per semester for Texas residents.
Many Boomers have the federal and state support for public universities to thank for giving them access to colleges and universities.
But conservatives soured on education for the masses and Ronald Reagan led the movement to curb access to unversities. He was elected governor of California in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California sysstem. Reagan repeatedly vowed “to clean up the mess” at UC Berkeley, which had become a national center of organizing against the Vietnam War. Reagan cut the state’s higher education budgets until the UC Board of Regents was forced to approve the system’s first tuition charges in 1970.
The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the US, Jon Schwarz noted at TheIntercept.com Aug. 25, 2022. President Richard Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Vice President Spiro Agnew complained that, thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”
Roger A. Freeman, an educational adviser to Nixon who was born in 1904 in Vienna, Austria, and fled to the US after the rise of Hitler, was an economist who became a fixture in conservative politics, serving on the White House staff during both the Dwight Eisenhower and Nixon administrations. He helped Reagan in his 1970 re-election campaign, and Freeman said at an Oct. 29, 1970, press conference, less than a week before the election, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism —“that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”
So Reagan forced UC to charge tuition in 1970 and federal and bank officials demanded City University of New York charge tuition in 1976, as a condition for city bankruptcy relief.
After Reagan became president in 1981, he cut federal aid to public education and tried to abolish the US Department of Education. He reduced higher education funding by 25%., and the federal government’s involvement in student aid shifted from grants to loans. He also eliminated Social Security payments to full-time students who were children of disabled, retired or deceased workers.
In 2022-23, the average cost of attending college (tuition and fees, room and board, and allowances for books and supplies, transportation and other personal expenses) for full-time undergraduate students ranged from $19,230 for public two-year in-district students and $27,940 for public four-year in-state students to $45,240 for public four-year out-of-state students and $57,570 for private nonprofit four-year students, the College Board reported.
To restore the principle that every student should be able to pursue higher education according to their skills, state legislatures should step up to make public universities affordable to students working no more than 20 hours a week. At the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, that means tuition should be no more than $3,625 a semester (or $7,250 a year). And the federal government should restore generous financial aid to boost students coming from lower-income families. No longer should graduates get a note that they owe more than $100,000 along with their diploma. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2023
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